With George Jonesian morbidity, I’ve been devouring the Wimbledon coverage—in Grantland!—by our sometime special tennis correspondent Louisa Thomas. (Come back, Louisa! We’ll quit our honky-tonking and running around, if you’ll just come back and keep writing the way you do.) —Lorin Stein

I don’t usually laugh out loud when I read, but Iris Owens’s alternately hilarious and appalling After Claude was getting me strange looks on the A train. Incidentally, it’s one of the great NYC summer books, too. —Sadie Stein

I picked up the charming Weeds by Richard Mabey, who suggests that our definition of the word is far more subjective and cultural than we would like to think. The book is sprinkled with entertaining anecdotes, like this one about the eminent rosarian Humphrey Brook, who became slightly belligerent after a few pints of beer at a local pub: “On the way back we passed a suburban garden where the owner was picking modern shrub roses whose shades were a farrago of Day-Glo reds and oranges. Humphrey stopped unsteadily, stared at the scene much as one might at a junk dealer gluing Formica onto a Chippendale table, and screamed ‘Vegetable rats!’ at the hapless grower.” —Thessaly La Force

Chris Weitz’s new movie, A Better Life, opens this weekend in New York at Lincoln Center and the Sunshine. I’ve heard a lot about the film, and it’s not clear how long it will run—I’m not taking any chances. —L. S.